Sony Cyber Shot Dsc-RX100

Sony is calling the DSC-RX100 the most advanced point and shoot it has ever released. That Exmos sensor is backed by an f/1.8 Carl-Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* lens with a 3.6x optical zoom, is also fairly compact, measuring in at 4 x 2.4 x 1.4 inches and weighing just under half a pound at 7.5 ounces. It offers a 3-inch, 1,229k dot LCD display bolstered by Sony’s WhiteMagic technology.

Speed, good looks, and pretty pictures number among the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100's strengths.

The bad:The camera tends to clip bright highlights more than we typically see, and the slippery body lacks a grip. Plus, the lack of a manually triggered macro mode might put off some fans of close-up photography.

Pont and shoot camera enthusiasts have been pitched to no end on the merits of massive megapixel counts and generous optical zoom lengths, so Sony's new Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 aims to add yet another metric to that perpetual arms race: sensor size. At the camera's heart is 20.2-megapixel 13.2 x 8.8mm Exmor CMOS sensor, which Sony claims is four times larger than those normally available in point-and-shoot cameras. We had an opportunity to get a bit of hands on time with the Cyber-shot DSC-RX100, and while we weren't allowed to capture any sample images — we were told the cameras weren't production quality just yet — we did get a chance to fiddle with some of the improvements.